EFF sues Uri Geller for misusing DMCA

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit yesterday against Uri Geller and his company Explorogist Ltd. for filing a DMCA takedown notice against a YouTube video posted by the Rational Response Squad. The video depicted an excerpt from the Nova program "Secrets of the Psychics" which featured James Randi showing how some of Geller's feats could have been done with magic tricks. The video includes about three seconds of footage owned by Geller, which clearly falls under fair use guidelines.

To quote from the EFF's press release: "We've seen a rash of people abusing the DMCA lately, attempting to take down legitimate criticism and commentary online," said EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz. "To allow thin-skinned public figures like Uri Geller to abuse this system forces critics to remain silent and creates unfair hurdles for free speech to thrive online."

The filings in the case may be found at the EFF's website. Here's the video, and a bonus video.





UPDATE (August 6, 2008): This lawsuit has been settled. There was a monetary settlement and Geller's company has agreed to license the footage for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license.

This integer is mine, you may not use it

70 D0 87 F2 02 2E 37 96 EB 84 B3 1B B5 92 10 E7

This 128-bit integer was used to encrypt a copyrighted haiku, and all rights to decrypt that haiku with this integer have been given to me. You may not use this 128-bit integer for any purpose; if you distribute it or publish it you are in violation of the DMCA's restrictions on circumvention.

(Actually, I've probably blown it by publishing this number--but there are others which are mine and which you also may not obtain or distribute. And that goes for you, too, AACS LA.)

You can get your own 128-bit integer and read the haiku for yourself at Ed Felten's Freedom to Tinker blog.

Cinco de Mayo: Celebration of kicking a French bill collector's ass

Long or Short Capital gives some historical detail on Cinco de Mayo that's generally lacking from most descriptions (with a little bit of exaggeration and humor). It's not a celebration of Mexican independence, but of a successful victory by Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragozea Seguin against French occupation forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.

The Mexican government owed money to the English, the Spanish, and the French, and was late on debt payments. All three creditors sent armed representatives to Mexico. The English and Spanish were successfully negotiated with, but the French decided to obtain repayment by taking possession of Mexico, and sent a large military force. General Zaragoza led a force of Mexicans and Indians and were victorious.

Banning the distribution of AACS keys is futile

AACS keys are used to encrypt the content of HD-DVDs (this is an oversimplification; see Ed Felten's Freedom-to-Tinker blog for more detail). A particular "processing key" for AACS has recently been distributed on the Internet, with the AACS Licensing Authority issuing cease and desist orders to try to stop it. This has led to new and creative ways of distributing this 128-bit number, just as occurred with the DeCSS code for decrypting DVDs. When a cease-and-desist order went to digg, digg's users proceeded to give diggs to many different sites, at one point leading to the entire front page of digg being full of nothing but links to pages with the AACS key.

A couple of the more interesting methods include making the number into a song and displaying it with satellite photos of buildings that resemble hex digits. One individual appears to have had it tattooed on his chest.

This is exactly what we saw with DeCSS, which is memorialized in Dave Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers.

This case is even more absurd, in that AACS LA is claiming ownership of a number--and a relatively short one--not because it encodes any content or algorithm, but because it's one of potentially millions of keys assigned for use with its system.

UPDATE (May 11, 2007): As this t-shirt makes clear, trying to protect against the distribution of a 128-bit number is futile when knowledge of the number can be easily distributed without using the number itself. I'd love to see AACS LA try to make a case against the marketing and sale of this shirt.

Bush's Iraq funding veto

Bush has vetoed the second bill of his presidency, the bill to continue funding the war on Iraq and specify a timetable for withdrawal. Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review points out that he signed the bill with a pen given to him by the father of a Marine killed in Iraq in 2005:

Bush signed the veto with a pen given to him by Robert Derga, the father of Marine Corps Reserve Cpl. Dustin Derga, who was killed in Iraq on May 8, 2005. The elder Derga spoke with Bush two weeks ago at a meeting the president had with military families at the White House.

David Weigel at Reason magazine asks why Bush didn't go all out:

At first you think "that's a little bit much, four years to the day after he appropriated different military imagery and it blew up in his face." And then you think - just a pen? Why not do it up proper? Drive up the road to Dover AFB, lean over a flag-draped coffin, and sign the bill with the Pen of Martyrs as 24 white doves are released into the air. Get Col. Bud Day to give color commentary. Set the whole tableau to the ringing tones of Dennis Madalone.

And Weigel also offers this interesting addendum:

Then there's this:

Derga asked Bush to promise to use the pen in his veto. On Tuesday, Derga contacted the White House to remind Bush to use the pen, and so he did.

He had to be reminded?

Where Are We Headed?

Given the explosive growth Maricopa County's Trustee Sale Notices saw in the second half of 2006, the numbers for the first four months of 2007 have seemed somewhat like a plateau. April’s total was 11 below March’s 1720, leading me to seriously wonder what the future holds.

From a recent Reuters article:

Subprime mortgages to less creditworthy borrowers comprised only 13.7 percent of outstanding U.S. mortgage debt in the fourth quarter of 2006, and their delinquency rate was 13.3 percent, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

If, like the article, you believe that the woes of the subprime mortgage market are “well contained,” then perhaps we have a hint of what the remainder of 2007 has in store.

Assume, for (extreme) simplicity’s sake, that...

1) All 1,250,231 houses in Maricopa County have a mortgage, and
2) The percentages quoted above remain the same for all of 2007, and
3) No one who does not have a subprime loan will become delinquent,

... then that means the average number of Phoenix-area trustee sale notices per month should come to 1898. I’m inclined to take it as a good sign that we’ve only seen a peak of 1720 so far, in spite of Mish’s contention, over at his Global Economic Trend Analysis, that containment is spreading.

However, the graph below, far more than Mish’s falling sky pronouncements, gives me pause:


Trustee’s Sale Notices are a lagging indicator, since they don't happen until the borrower has been in big trouble for several months. That fact, in conjunction with the data behind the Credit Suisse graph, leads me to believe that late 2007 through early 2008 (and beyond) is when we should be expecting the big wave to hit. How big? Who can say?

Who's to blame for the Virginia Tech shootings

The Cynical-C Blog is keeping a running tab, and are up to a list of 72 items so far...

Individual armed resistance can bring school shootings to a halt

Classically Liberal reports on multiple school shooting incidents which have been successfully stopped by private individuals with handguns--though the media has mostly failed to report that the individuals apprehending the gunmen were armed, so these examples aren't widely known.

Patri Friedman at Catallarchy observes:

Anyway, I am not claiming that any one story (or in this case, four stories) prove anything about the overall tradeoffs. But these stories are in direct contrast to explicit statements some of you have made about how you think the world works. So please realize that you were wrong, and that guns are demonstrably capable of stopping massacres short. Doesn’t mean we should have them, but it is directly relevant to yesterday’s incident. We don’t know what the distribution of death reductions would have been if the massacre hadn’t been in a gun free zone, but it surely has a non-zero mean, and quite possibly a significant one. After all, this was an extremely bad massacre, which means more people involved and more time to get armed.

But of course, probabilistic lives saved by guns are vastly less visceral than actual lives ended by them, hence much more difficult for us to view as real.

How sleazy real estate gurus make money

Einzige has a great post at his blog titled "Making Fortunes* in Foreclosures (* Once you've discarded your ethical compass)" which describes the details of how some sleazy real estate gurus make money off of gullible homeowners in distress.

Back from the UK

We are back from a trip to London (with side trips to Warwick Castle, Stratford-upon-Avon, Oxford, and a couple days in Cambridge). Although we didn't plan it, we happened to see a number of interesting things on St. George's Day--the immediate aftermath of the attempted suicide jumper rescue at Millennium Bridge (my own photos are much less interesting than the Daily Mail's) and the Guinness Record attempt (successful, I believe) for largest coconut orchestra at Trafalgar Square (with Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, and the cast of Spamalot in attendance, singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life"). We got to see both Oxford and Cambridge's respective Bridges of Sighs (Cambridge says theirs is better because it's over water; Oxford's is really named Hertford Bridge), had lunches at the Eagle Pub and at The Orchard.

The photo is me in a doorway at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Unfortunately, we did not make it to Logic Lane.